Shut down the Aga for summer and get cracking with a Big Green Egg, an outdoor
cooker that claims to be more than a barbecue

It’s one of Middle England’s great dilemmas: should you turn off your Aga over the summer? Agas are great at warming the house in winter – last year we didn’t have to switch on our central heating once – but they can make life unbearably hot in July and August.

If, like us, you are obsessed with these overpriced ranges, there tends to be no Plan B in the kitchen. When we took out a small mortgage to buy ours (reconditioned, oil-fired), we thought that would be cheating. So we don’t have a back-up gas or electric stove. It’s the Aga or nothing.

Now, it seems, there is an alternative. You might have seen the Big Green Egg at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, where Michelin-starred chefs put this beast of a barbecue through its paces. The technology behind the “outdoor cooker”, as its American makers prefer it to be called, is nothing new, owing much to the kamado in Japan and the Indian tandoor.

It’s effectively a ceramic oven that can grill like a barbecue, roast and bake like an oven, and smoke “low and slow” like a smokehouse.

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To find out if we can go into Aga shutdown and cook on an Egg, feeding a family of five without complaint, I decided to test one out for a week. I was keen to discover if it could live up to its considerable marketing hype, and justify the hefty price tag – £399 for a Mini, £700 for a large, £1,250 for an X-large.

Cards on the table: I’m a man who likes to barbecue. By that I mean I enjoy standing in plumes of smoke with a cold beer, fiddling with air vents and long tongs, and burning sausages. I can also be quite boring when it comes to charcoal: nothing but environmentally sourced lumpwood for me.

By these crude criteria, the Egg – I tested a medium – wins on all counts.

It has vents to die for: two patented, temperature-controlling ones. And by controlled, I mean to the nearest five degrees. A thermometer in the dome lid allows for hours of manly fine-tuning. The Egg-branded 100 per cent organic lump charcoal, made from oak and hickory, is also hard to fault, apart from the air miles (it’s from America). You can start cooking on it within 15 minutes.

Purity is everything here – as well as branding. Natural Egg fire-starters are recommended. Lighter fluid is a dirty word, as it contaminates the ceramic cooking chamber. I feel guilty enough just using a standard match. (The phosphorous! The potassium!)

The biggest bonus for men is the “plate setter”, a heat diffuser that sits between the coals and the cast-iron grill. It protects food from direct heat, preventing burning by circulating it around the chamber instead. (The Egg uses a mixture of convection, conduction and radiant heat.) In a first, I manage to serve unburnt sausages. A far bigger triumph comes when I cook a whole chicken. The bird sits upright on a vertical chicken roaster, placed on the grille. I set the temperature at 180C – once you’ve twiddled with the two vents to get the right temperature, it stays remarkably constant – and an hour-and-a-quarter later, the chicken is done to perfection: brown and crispy skin, juicy and succulent meat inside.

Chicken and egg: the Big Green Egg is good for vertically roasting chicken

Over the next few days, I rustle up a cooked breakfast, kippers, more sausages, halloumi and loads of vegetables (sweetcorn is particularly tasty), careful to “burp” the lid before opening it. This prevents a rush of heat that might burn your hands. On one particularly ambitious evening, I vertically roast a chicken at the same time as cooking belly of pork (which sits in a tray on the plate setter below the grill). Aga users will also appreciate the ability to cook slowly – we regularly use our bottom oven for overnight roasting. Set at a low temperature, the Egg can cook for 10 hours on one load of charcoal.

There are problems. For one of the chickens, I soak some hickory chips (branded, of course), before sprinkling them on the charcoal. They generate lots of aromatic smoke – and a jet of flame that shoots out from the lower vent. This is my fault as I soaked the chips in my brother-in-law’s strong (and unbranded) homemade beer.

Patented it may be, but the top vent is a bit fiddly. The frame that the Egg sits in is crudely designed compared to the pleasing curves of the Egg itself. And we eat far more meat in a week than we normally do in a month.

But these are minor quibbles. The Egg is an extraordinary piece of kit, a very forgiving way to cook outdoors: nothing burns and everything stays moist. I still think it’s overpriced, but an Egg is supposed to last a lifetime. A lot of run-of-the-mill barbecues need to be replaced every two or three years. So, another small mortgage, and it’s in with the Egg and off with Aga.